The oilsands loom large over the coming March 3 provincial election. “Boom management,” as Keith Brownsey of Mount Royal College calls it, will be the underlying issue, with Alberta’s social and environmental problems all linked in some way to the oilsands. Chaldeans Mensah, who teaches political science at Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan College, goes one step further: he says the party that can demonstrate it has the right development plan and the strength to enforce it will win votes.
Environmental and social activists are looking for detailed plans. Even before Premier Ed Stelmach announced the election, interest groups had mobilized, asking questions and demanding more than platitudes from political hopefuls.
“The tar sands and rampant growth are exacerbating things,” says Bill Moore-Kilgannon, executive director of Public Interest Alberta. “But the real root of the problem is that a lot of core public issues haven’t had political priority.”
Fast Forward offers a summary of the campaign issues — and how the oilsands relates to all of them. As the Sierra Club’s Lindsay Telfer notes, “The cumulative effects of development — that’s about the environment and our society.”
OIL ROYALTIES
Watch out for wild spin on the issue of how much our oil is really worth. As the auditor general has reported, billions in oil revenue have slipped through Albertans’ fingers. Alberta has some of the lowest royalty rates in the world compared to other petroleum-producing jurisdictions. Don’t take the party lines on royalties at face value.
DEMOCRACY
After 37 years with the same ruling party, debate on the health of Alberta’s democracy is unavoidable. Lacklustre government responses to the royalty report and Bill 46 brought the issue into the mainstream. “People really are getting it and understand that it is a systemic issue,” Moore-Kilgannon says. “There is more to democracy than just voting every five years. They want to be engaged between elections.”
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Gee whiz, who would have thought thousands of people pouring into the province would cause such a housing crisis? While the issues of homelessness and shelter spaces are of the highest priority, the price of housing even has the middle class is struggling.
CITIES
Besides bearing the social costs of the oil boom, such as increased homelessness, Calgary and Edmonton have the burden of building new roads and public facilities for increasing populations as construction prices soar. Infrastructure debt has its own kind of interest rates.
CHILD CARE
Members of the Alberta Association of Services for Children and Families have an average staff turnover rate of 38 per cent per year. Wages can’t keep up with inflation. “As the province grows, these agencies are really struggling,” says Moore-Kilgannon. “It’s not like Tim Hortons, where people just have to wait a little bit longer if there isn’t enough staff. It means shutting down the program.”
HEALTH-CARE
Stelmach has committed to eliminating health-care premiums, and all other parties are on board. (After all, isn’t Alberta the richest province in Confederation?) That’s not the only flashpoint on this hot issue. “There is still the threat of privatization lurking in the wings,” says Friends of Medicare executive director Suzanne Marshall. On the fringes, the “Third Way” is gaining ground, with private clinics and corporate takeovers of publicly operated retirement homes.
EDUCATION
A coalition of Alberta universities, colleges and technical institutes will soon launch their Imagine Alberta campaign. It will urge political parties to diversify Alberta’s economy and get it out of the boom-and-bust cycle by committing to a long-term investment in education.
ENVIRONMENT
More than 55 groups have called for a moratorium on oilsands development. Telfer, head of the Sierra Club’s prairie chapter, sees the environment as the big-picture issue. “What we are rolling out in our election campaigns is going to be quite focused on the pace of development,” she says. “That’s what really gets at it, because we are talking across departments here.” She points out that the people of Fort Chipewyan are seeing more and more diseased animals in their community as a consequence of oilsands development.
EMISSIONS
The oilsands may have made us rich, but they certainly haven’t made us green. According to the Pembina Institute, oilsands crude production generates three times more greenhouse gas emissions than the production of conventional oil. Alberta’s carbon emissions are in the neighborhood of 200 megatonnes annually. How to reduce that amount will play huge in this election.
WATER
As acclaimed University of Alberta researcher David Schindler warns, the deadly combination of global warming, historic drought patterns, increased use by industry (most notably oil and gas) and growing population means Alberta is facing water shortages. When the candidates come knocking, see if the issue is on their radar.
